A Bibliotecal Heresy -- Response from Walter de Gruyter.

This article provides information on the price structure of books published by Walter de Gruyter Publishers. Walter de Gruyter is not just one company, with one program and one price structure. Rather, it consists of many entities, with two primary divisions. The first is Walter de Gruyter,the parent company with its humanists departments including theology, Classics, Philosophy, Archeology, Literature and Linguistics and the Natural Sciences and Medicine divisions. All of the aforementioned departments publish mainly in German. Second, there is Mouton de Gruyter, which was known as Mouton Publishers until acquired by Walter de Gruyter in 1976. More than 90 percent of this division's publications are in English. Mouton de Gruyter is therefore the only division comparable to Kluwer and Benjamins. Both Benjamins and Mouton are scholarly publishers with a core program in linguistics. It is presumptuous to belive that the circulation of a German-language book in a U.S. library would be as high as an English-language book in the same library. Although Germans sometimes choose to ignore this fact, the ability to read in the language of the Philosophers is lower than the German writing academia acknowledges.